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| Advanced Configuration Power Interface |
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ACPI (Advanced Configuration Power Interface) refers to a Power Management specification developed by Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba. The specification allows an operating system to control the power distribution to peripherals such as hard drives, it was originally intended for laptops/notebooks where power saving is vital.
Since Windows 98, ACPI has replaced the older APM (Advanced Power Management) specification (used in Windows 95).
ACPI allows the operating system to communicate with the computer's BIOS and instruct the BIOS to power down peripherals, for instance when your computer goes into hibernation mode, the operating system is using the ACPI specification to control the power to the internal components. |
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| Asymmetric Digital Subscribers Line |
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| What function does ADSL/DSL serve? |
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Sometimes refered to as Broadband, ADSL is a connection available from Telecom companies using existing lines with fast download & upload speeds.
It works by splitting your phone line signal into two separate channels, one for normal voice usage and the other for data usage, this is achieved by placing a splitter on the existing phone line to enable multi-frequency communication.
It can reach speeds of up to 9Mbit per second for downloading and currently up to 640Kbits per second upload speed.
Another advantage of having an ADSL line is not missing calls while you're online, as both voice and data can be transferred at the same time.
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| Accelerated Graphics Port |
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| What is the function of the AGP |
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An interface developed by Intel which allows a graphics card to access memory directly which along with the wider bandwidth helps improve graphics performance.
AGP has now come to replace a lot of PCI video cards due to its superior performance, most modern motherboards have an AGP slot as standard. Some motherboards come with an AGP graphics card built-in.
You will see AGP cards advertised with different specifications, including throughput (bandwidth), here is a summary of the throughput they refer to:
1X - 266MBps
2X - 533MBps
4X - 1.07GBps
8X - 2.1GBps
Obviously the higher the throughput the better, although nowadays most video cards run at 8X. |
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The ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) is an internal part of the processor which is used for all mathematical and logical operations, the basic operations of an ALU include adding and multiplying binary values as well as performing logical operations such as AND, OR and XOR.
The algorithms for performing these mathematical and logical operations are hard coded (stored permanently) within the ALU. |
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| American National Standards Institute |
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| An American body responsible for the standardisation system since 1918. ANSI establishes the United States industrial standards and it's primary task is to determine hardware and software standards, it is the US representative to ISO. |
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| American Standard Code for Information Interchange |
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| A widely used character encoding system first used in 1963. It uses a 7 bit code to represent characters with numbers (0 to 127), there are also ASCII extensions in use which utilise 8 bit codes to represent international characters in addition to the standard ASCII scheme. |
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When in the context of internet web sites ASP refers to a specification which can be likened to CGI, ASP technology allows the site developer to create dynamic web pages through the use of ActiveX.
ASP pages are used for numerous tasks including form handling, database connectivity, even putting a date and time on a page. Jscript or VB Script are the most common scripting languages used with ASP pages. [ASP can also mean Active Server Provider] |
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